9486 in the collection
Everyone hates PACT
Ohanian Comment: As if getting a letter about the importance of a good breakfast is what parents hate about standardized testing. But the writer specializes in broad pronouncements based on an authoritarian point of view. She insists that learning is a continuum and that computer testing tells a teacher what every child knows.
Ordinarily, I would ignore such tripe, but since the writer is unidentified by the paper, I will provide that information. With a BS in Ceramic Engineering, Kristin Maguire is co-founder of South Carolina Parents Involved in Education (SC PIE). A home schooling mom, she was appointed by conservative governor Mark Sanford to a seat on the South Carolina Board of Education in 2000. In late 2007, she was named president-elect of the South Carolina Board of Education. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute was quick to applaud this choice.
The SC PIE website reveals a major focus of Maguire: SC PIE provides abstinence education training to public school teachers, faith leaders, parents, and public and private health care providers in targeted communities.
Other issues of top concern to SC PIE: HPV Vaccines, Intelligent Design, Parent Choice, Pledge of Allegiance, American History. Take a look at the sites to which they link.
By Kristin Maguire
Mention the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT), and the response is unanimous. Administrators hate posting the nebulous results. Students hate the drill. Parents hate getting the letters home telling them to make sure their kids get a good breakfast on PACT days. Teachers hate spending so much time and energy on a test that gives them too little data too late to help their students.
Though the Education Accountability Act of 1998 specified that the information reported to schools should be useful for classroom instruction and curriculum decisions, PACT has failed to deliver. The information from the spring PACT arrives halfway through the next fall when students are with new teachers in a new classroom. PACT results show us what happened last year instead of what to do now.
For the want of a reliable assessment most South Carolina School districts, through their own initiative, have adopted another testing system to help them make academic gains with all students. The Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test and the professional development that accompanies it allow them to make plans for moving all children forward.
MAP is a computer adaptive based on the premise learning is a continuum and that children make progress along this continuum. The MAP, through computer adaptive testing, pinpoints every student on this continuum. Teachers receive almost immediate results about their students individually and as a class. They then focus instruction on advancing students while students make personal growth goals based on their achievement levels.
As one new teacher told me, "MAP testing is amazing! I know where all my kids are and what I need to do immediately to move them ahead."
When I brought up the PACT, she rolled her eyes and went back to highlighting the instructional strategies she was using with all of her kids based on the MAP results.
It is in the middle of this overwhelming, and justified, dissatisfaction with the PACT and excitement over the usefulness of the MAP that the call for the abolishment of the PACT gained momentum and started sailing through the legislature. And I totally agree that PACT wastes the resources devoted to it. There are just a couple of problems with the promises of "killing the PACT."
First, spring testing will not be a thing of the past. Both our own Education Accountability Act and No Child Left Behind require an end of year "summative" test to be given to all children. This test must be based on our state academic standards and be given at the "end" of the academic year.
Second, regardless of the name, unless the academic standards are revised and the structure and administration of the spring test are changed, our children will simply take PACT by another name. This is all the more likely if a "new" test is hurriedly developed by the same contractors we use now for the PACT.
Third, by naming a new test in statute as the current legislation does, we eliminate our state's ability to take advantage of new technology and federal flexibility. When the Education Accountability Act was passed in 1998, web based and adaptive testing were distant specks on the horizon. The knowledge and expert bases had huge blank spots.
Ten years later, our teachers and students use MAP test results to plot their academic courses. Principals restructure their teaching staffs and target professional development based on immediate MAP results. Course corrections are made immediately.
The EAA mandates a cumbersome structure of Individual Academic Plans based on the testing world of 1998. In 2008, better tools are available. Let's not cast in stone the testing methodology of 2008 and set up more frustrations for our students and teachers as more reliable and specific tools are developed.
The time is past for the original promises of the EAA to be fulfilled: accurate and useful information returned to parents, teachers, and students about the academic achievement of all children in a timely manner.
PACT has been a miserable failure. But in our rush to "kill the PACT" we mustn't squander this opportunity to substantively increase the value of our spring testing. Legislating a name change and locking our state into a specific test developed by the same people would be doing just that.
— Kristin Maguire
Columbia Star
2008-05-16
http://www.thecolumbiastar.net/news/2008/0516/government/011.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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